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  He called a warning to Gnea, but she had already seen it. Halidarre changed course abruptly. With its fantastic quickness and strength, and in the confines of the dome, the Invid mecha came close to nailing them. Halidarre almost bucked Rem into the air, filling with her wings and cutting in her impeller fields. Gnea herself only kept her seat by a determined gripping with her long, strong legs.

  But the Hellcat missed, landing on a lower ledge of the heap and turning to surge up its side again for another try, missing its footing twice in the shifting debris. Gnea turned the winged horse for the opening in the dome, to reach temporary safety.

  “No!” Rem yelled. “I left the shuttle hatch open! We can’t let them get inside!” It was very likely their only hope of escape, now that the flagship was engaged in battle, and probably the only way of linking up with the recon team again in time to get them offworld.

  To his horror, as he looked down dizzily, he saw the second ’Cat’s tail disappear through the hatch.

  Rem spied the Wolverine rifle in its scabbard and somehow managed to get it out without dropping it. But by that time Gnea had banked around a mountain of decrepit machinery off at the far side of the dome, and he had no clear shot. She picked a spot that looked stable and landed, high above the floor of the dome.

  He slid down off the saddle and Gnea leapt down after. Off in the distance they could hear growling and the shifting of junk that meant the first Hellcat was still stalking them.

  “There’s no time to waste,” Rem decided. “I have to go after the one that got into the ship. Can you handle this one?”

  She pulled her own sidearm from its shoulder holster and took his from his belt as well, balancing them in hands bigger than his. “It seems I must, doesn’t it? And so I will, somehow.”

  Halidarre snorted and reared a bit, wings deploying and beating a little faster, half lifting her into the air. A sudden thought occurred to Rem. “We’ll have to split up and take on both Hellcats at once. Gnea, how good is your control over the horse? How fine is your touch?”

  She smiled grimly. “Try me, Tiresian!”

  A few moments later, the feline mecha bounded up among the peaks and sinkholes of discarded industrial rubble and came around the corner to behold Bela standing, waiting, with both pistols leveled. There was no sign of the male Tiresiod, but the sound of jumping and occasional slipping told it that he was in all probability making his way down toward his ship.

  The Inorganic ignored the sound of Rem’s frantic escape; its huntmate would take care of him. And, more to the point, once a Hellcat was zeroed in on a particular quarry, it pursued that quarry to the exclusion of all else.

  The limitations of the early-model Living Computer in Karbarra’s capital meant that the central brain could spare no attention for the ’Cat’s report of the encounter, what with the outbreak of battle above the planet and the immediate need to prepare for defense. The Hellcats would simply return with slain enemies, to show what they had found and eliminated.

  Surprise wasn’t a mental trait of any great importance to the Invid mecha; when it saw that the tactical situation had changed only slightly, it simply began an even more straightforward attack, dodging Gnea’s inexpert shots by jumping behind a mound of debris. Then it began working its way in her direction. There was no sign of the winged-quadruped mecha, but the ’Cat kept eyes and ears and other sensors alert for possible air attack.

  It watched from concealment as Gnea crouched in the inadequate shelter of a smelting processor, and the Hellcat began gathering itself for the final rush, choosing a route around a convenient bit of broken machinery.

  The ’Cat rushed, and knew that it would have her before she could so much as bring the handguns around, much less get off a volume of fire sufficient to stop or damage it. But just as it skittered around the debris to cover the final few yards, the debris came alive.

  Armor-hard, scalpel-sharp rear hooves lashed out with the power of twin battering rams, scoring on the Hellcat’s jaw and side; the Invid machine was thrown off-balance, leaking power from damaged systemry in its shattered jaw and crushed “rib cage.” It went tottering off the ledge of the junk mountain with a yowl.

  Gnea rushed to the brink, imaging a call to Halidarre. The winged horse disengaged itself from the splayed pose it had taken, pretending to be part of the ruined jumble of a millwork multirobot—the debris the ’Cat had seen. Halidarre was wingless now.

  Gnea looked down to where the Hellcat lay squirming and partially broken, but took no chances; she held out the pistols side by side, pouring down bolt after bolt until it stopped moving, and internal disruptions sent flames shooting from its seams. It gave a last great howl and lay inert, smoking and molten.

  Gnea was up on Halidarre’s back at once; surely the second Hellcat was warned, and Rem had gone after it alone.

  The second ’Cat was indeed aware, and waiting. It had no fear, but it did have cunning and a total commitment to slay the enemy and carry out its mission; since the ’Cat’s destruction would prohibit that, such destruction and defeat were to be avoided.

  Now it crouched within the shuttle, making low sounds to itself. It had scanned and recorded the nature and construction of the ship for later analysis by the Living Computer on Karbarra, then began demolishing the shuttle, only to be given pause by the death sounds of its huntmate.

  Its first impulse was to go out and meet its enemies, then it decided to do as much damage as it could in the ship—perhaps drawing them to it, the better to avoid its enemies’ ambush. It swiped at another bank of intrumentation; shattered pieces and shredded console housing fell to the deck. The ’Cat watched the hatch avidly, certain that it could defeat either of the Tiresiods or the bulky winged-quadruped mecha in the limited interior space of the shuttle, before they could make any effective moves.

  But what came zipping through the hatch was neither the Tiresiods nor their odd machine; it was something small and fast, darting about the cabin at great speed, spoiling the Hellcat’s savage calculations and provoking it to launch itself for the kill before it had really planned to.

  The Invid mecha landed on the far side of the main cabin, snapping the copilot’s chair off its mount. The flying thing made an audacious dive, smacking the ’Cat rudely on the head, then zooming for the hatch again. The furious Hellcat catapulted after it, and out the hatch.

  Rem, kneeling against the outer hull by the hatch and sweating profusely, saw the flying remote-reconnaissance module that fit in the niche on Halidarre’s back come flashing out of the shuttle. He braced himself, feeling his hands slick with perspiration on the Wolverine rifle.

  The Hellcat came through the hatch like a dark comet. Its powerful pseudo-muscles gathered and it launched itself into the air, but the quick-moving remote module had changed course with the agility of a dragonfly, and eluded it. When the ’Cat came down, Rem was ready, holding down the Wolverine’s trigger and spraying a steady stream of white-hot devastation at it.

  The ’Cat reacted with amazing dexterity, almost somersaulting out of the line of fire. Rem stood his ground and he slewed the beam back and forth in an effort to get a sustained hit. He was unaware of Gnea’s ululating war cry as she guided Halidarre down from the junk hills, heedless of the peril to herself, rushing to help even though it might mean a fatal fall … even though she knew she was too far away.

  Rem held the trigger down still, in spite of what his Human instructors had cautioned. The explosion of an overloaded power pack was preferable to being rent and savaged by a Hellcat.

  Then the ’Cat seemed to stagger, howling, as he had it in his sights for a second and more, washing the Wolverine’s raving blast across it. But a moment later, the Wolverine’s beam quit, its systemry burned out. The assault rifle was so hot that he dropped it rather than have the flesh scorched from his palms.

  The ’Cat, mortally wounded, lurched and limped toward him, still agile enough in its dying moments that Rem saw that he could never outrun it. One e
ye was cold and dead; the other was all the brighter with hatred. It cut him off from the hatch he would surely have headed for.

  He scuttled backward and sprawled. The Inorganic was about to throw itself upon him when it wavered, its systemry fluxing. At that moment something swooped into view, flying erratically. The remote module from Halidarre could barely stay aloft, bearing as it did a burden it wasn’t designed for. Like a butterfly delivering a key chain, it did a snap roll and slipped the strap it had managed to catch with its wing, dumping its cargo into Rem’s lap.

  The ’Cat shook off its momentary malaise and looked back at its prey. Rem activated the power pack and fumbled at the thick olive-drab cable that connected it to the blunt, heavy Owens gun, opening fire. The Owens was built for just the kind of sustained close-range annihilation that had burned out the Wolverine; the Hellcat threw up a terrible screech and seemed to collapse in on itself.

  Rem didn’t take his finger off the trigger until the ’Cat looked like a lava runoff. Gnea was standing by; the module had already returned to its place in Halidarre’s back, and Halidarre was stretching her wings once again, making a sound-processed whinney.

  Gnea offered her hand to help Rem to his feet. He pushed the Owens and its power pack aside wearily and accepted. Gnea, who had followed Bela’s lead in showing hostility to Rem, now thumped him on the shoulder.

  “We’ll make a woman of you yet,” she told him with vast approval.

  Rem was happy for a split second, until he remembered that the second Hellcat had been in the shuttle. With a cry, he leapt past her for the hatch.

  The scene within made him slump against the hatch-frame. From what he could discern from the damage the huge ’Cat mecha had done, the shuttle could lift off again, and the uplink to the Sentinels’ flagship might still work. But the recon-relay rig was in fragments, and the scouting party was out of touch, maybe for good.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Here’s a peculiar thing: I wasn’t the only one at the Academy with something to prove or disprove; I never asked, but it seems to me now that there were a lot of ’em like me, pushing the envelopes of their own lives the way the test pilots were pushing the envelopes with their aerospacecraft.

  My father’s Doctor Penn, naturally, and everybody calls him the leading brain on Earth after Emil Lang. I like my father, but I think he has the conviction that because I didn’t accept that New Rhodes scholarship, and went into the Academy instead, I’m some sort of intellectual failure. Since I’m enjoined to tell you about all the things that pertain, I’ll say that my father still holds the death of my mother, in childbirth, against me—unconsciously, of course.

  I forgive him—he’s a brilliant man. But I don’t want him running my life. I have my own agenda.

  From REF-selection diagnostic session, cadet-graduate Penn, Karen

  Rick’s group knew that something was wrong almost at once; when one of their thirty-minute-interval commo checks failed to draw any response after repeated efforts, Rick called a halt to consider what to do.

  The equipment the team was carrying couldn’t punch a signal through to the Sentinels’ flagship, certainly not without giving the group’s position away. Only the more sophisticated system aboard the shuttle could do that, and Rem and Gnea weren’t answering.

  There wasn’t much dissention; the recon party had become closer through shared hardship, and Rick’s position as leader had solidified. “We can’t stop so close to our objective,” he told them. “Maybe Rem will reestablish contact. But even if he doesn’t, reaching our objective and carrying out our scouting mission before we turn back won’t cost us that much more time.”

  Nobody seemed inclined to object, least of all Lron. But it was Bela who came up with an interim solution. She approached Rick with what he now thought of as “that goddamn canard-winged pest”—her malthi—resting with its many claws dug into her forearm sheath. “Hagane can serve as our messenger,” she said.

  Rick and the others looked at the woman and the little hawk. “You mean she can find her way to Rem?” Rick asked slowly. “What if she gets lost?”

  Bela gave him an indignant look. “Hagane does not get lost.” She was already taking banding and writing materials from a fancy tooled pouch at her belt, nodding. “Any route she has passed over, she can retrace, even one underground.”

  Bela looked to Lron. “And much faster than any Karbarran. If the shuttle is gone or the others are dead, my Hagane will simply return without a message.”

  And it seemed unlikely the creature would have any trouble with the winged things the team had spotted in the caves; Hagane’s few exploratory flights had shown that the cave’s inhabitants were only too eager to stay clear of the diamond-clawed, knife-beaked whirlwind that was Bela’s pet.

  Rick’s head was swimming, but he made a few decisions then and there. “We’ll send Hagane on her flight from the observation point, so that she’ll know her route all the way back to us and—and won’t, uh, have to track us.” He had a vision of the avian thing whizzing through the caves, and tried to figure out how fast Hagane could make the trip. Hell; it would be a quick commute.

  Bela nodded at Rick’s wisdom, and he returned the courtesy. They pressed on and, as Lron had promised, soon found themselves looking out over a huge expanse of weather-tormented Karbarran landscape. The cave’s irregular opening might have been any one of hundreds honeycombing the wind- and sand-scoured landscape of cliffs, but it was the only one that connected directly to the Karbarrans’ secret underground maze. Natural phosphorescence gave the place a dim blue-green glow, so that they didn’t need their vision devices to see one another. They shed the bat-ears, too.

  The Praxian had settled down to work. “Now, the message must be short, so what will it say? Bear in mind, Gnea can send an answer back to me here, but that reply must be concise, too.”

  The message Bela laboriously wrote, her tongue in one corner of her mouth, was in cramped glyphics, the whole-concept code symbols of the Praxians, using a pen with a point as narrow as a syringe. She tucked the tissue-fine bit of paper into a tiny metal capsule and bound it to Hagane’s leg. Hagane sat still, though her menacing beak opened in objection to this liberty, even taken by her beloved mistress.

  Bela kissed the lambent-eyed Hagane’s feathers and Hagane nuzzled her. The amazon released the creature from her hands. Hagane dove down the cave, retracing her route. “How long will it take, do you think?” Kami asked, voice muffled by his mask.

  Bela considered. “To get there and back? Perhaps there will have to be consultation with the flagship. Let us say, two hours.”

  “Then, we’ll get what rest we can,” Rick decided. Everybody was bushed, and the call to move fast and hard again might be no further away than Hagane’s return. He saw no reason to set up double guards, or anything more than short lookout watches, so that everybody could get some rest. There wasn’t likely to be anything to observe or analyze for military intelligence purposes under the Karbarran night sky in the next few hours. The guard on watch would also make periodic commo calls in an effort to reestablish contact with the shuttle.

  Karen Penn volunteered for the first half-hour shift. No one objected. Lron, who felt no need of blanket or bedroll, curled up by the mouth of the cave, and looked off into the night. The rest of them took swigs of water or went off into a private alcove to attend to personal business, and then composed themselves for sleep.

  Karen Penn, muscles still cramped from the grueling traverse of the Karbarran underground, moved to a rock surface off to one side and silently began a t’ai chi routine, moving with precision and a flowing grace that wasn’t occidental. Jack, curled in his mummy bag with only one eye showing, followed her every move but said nothing.

  “What is that you do?” asked Bela suddenly, her voice unexpectedly soft, while the others began nodding off.

  Karen spoke softly, too, without stopping. “This is an exercise/combat system that was devised long ago on
my world. It gives a person focus and intimate awareness of the body and of nature.”

  She stopped and assumed another pose. “We have more vigorous, forceful systems as well.” She went through a brief kata at full speed, snapping punches and kicks, demonstrating rotary blocks and stiff-fingered blows with much less grace but as precisely as a machine.

  When Karen was done, Bela regarded her for a moment, then said, “These are beautiful and effective-looking fighting forms, and you seem adept. You are not so foolish as I thought, Karen Penn.” She began pulling her campaign cloak, the only cover she appeared to need, around her.

  Karen blinked. “Foolish?” Listen, honey, as big as you are, I’ll—

  “Foolish for placing such importance on a mere male,” Bela said, and closed her predatory eyes, turning away to sleep. Karen stared at Bela, thinking about what she had said. Luckily for Jack, he had covered his face completely before Karen glanced his way, immersed in confused thoughts and crosswired impulses.

  The fourth watch was Kami’s; Rick woke him, then retired to his own ultralight but warm and comfortable mummy bag. He was asleep in seconds.

  Kami went off into a small cul-de-sac so as not to disturb anyone and tried another commo call to Rem and Gnea, without success. Putting the apparatus aside, he realized he was feeling a certain oddness in his perceptions, a lack of depth and a flatness of feature. It occurred to him that he had lowered the flow from his inhalant tank, to economize during sleep.

  The tank wasn’t his sole source of air, of course; such a supply would have been too bulky to carry. Instead, his mask frugally mixed his homeworld’s atmosphere with that of the local surroundings at any given time.

  He increased the flow, and in moments felt the Higher Reality come into sharp focus again, with its enhanced perceptions and expanded awareness. The winds rustling the sands whispered their secrets to him, and the stars overhead twinkled messages from the moment of their birth. Ghostly—but unfortunately, minor—Sendings made themselves known in the form of images or disembodied voices. But still he couldn’t perceive the greater Truths of this war.